Friday 23rd June - Einville to Nancy

We left  Einville at 9 a.m. - not our best stop I have to say.  We had left ourselves a much easier day today, thanks to the trials and tribulations of yesterday.  At first all the locks were with us but Gary was helming (his last day!) and realised that we had a boat in front of us so tried to catch it up so that we could share the locks.  We did catch him up but on closer examination, realised that he was too big to share with so we were left with the problem of letting him go down and having to wait for the lock to refill before we too, could descend!  We had a much fresher day, albeit with a lot more wind making the boat somewhat harder to handle.  We hovered waiting for the lock to refill but the operation was suspended and we had to call the VNF - it was fixed easily and we were on our way again.  Two locks later we had the same problem!! We arrived in Nancy around 3 p.m. and managed to squeeze into a berth OK but it was a difficult mooring due to the narrowness of the space between the boats and the wind......Gary managed it splendidly though!!  We had a late lunch and then the boys went into town to find the railway station for Gary to buy tickets to Paris for tomorrow as our crew will be leaving Aphrodite to go back to Lanzarote.  Amazingly there is no train from Nancy to Paris direct- they have to take a bus from Nancy to a new station called Lorraine to catch the TGV to Charles de Gaulle airport. On summer evenings in Stanislas

Square in Nancy there is a light show around 10.30 p.m. - we saw it five years ago and hoped to repeat the experience, it being a nice finale for Gary and Tina. We were lucky enough to find a table in a restaurant in the square, although the service was chaotic and the food pretty average.  We had a charming young waitress who told us she was new to the job......this was rather obvious in fact.  She finally got our order in and we were serve aperitifs.  She couldn't quite grasp the concept of us wanting one red and one white bottle of wine but we got there in the end!!  However Skip and Crew had ordered a simple pasta dish which arrived simultaneously - we waited a little while but decided to start eating even though Gary and Tinas' meals hadn't arrived!  In fact we had finished by the time their dinner arrived!  The head waiter proffered a bottle of Grappa to make amends, not our favourite tipple I'm afraid!  The light show was very good but not the same or quite as good as the one we had watched five years ago.....Gary and Tina enjoyed it though.  We had our last digestifs and chat on deck ( the weather had been fantastic for their 8 day visit - even if a bit too hot and exhausting some days!

27 km 9 locks 6 hours